Uploaded April 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Alice Eldridge joins the third FluCoMa plenary as a guest speaker to discuss her work in creative coding in her talk 'Alice's adventures in sonic systems lands; Composing and decomposing sonic systems'.

flucoma.org
profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p127749-alice-eldridge

The third FluCoMa plenary saw the creative coders involved in the early testing and refinement of the FluCoMa toolboxes, as well as two external specialists and the project team, come together for four days of discussion, brainstorming, and critical engagement with the FluCoMa project. The first toolbox, Fluid Decomposition, was released in a celebratory concert where the first cohort of critical users of the tools premiered their work.


/// CREDITS

Video camera operator: Sam Gillies
Edited by Sam Gillies
Assisted by Jacob Hart, James Bradbury, and Laurens van der Wee
FluCoMa video bumper by Angela Guyton

Recorded November 21, 2019, University of Huddersfield


/// BIOGRAPHY

Alice Eldridge’s background in music, psychology (BSc), evolutionary and adaptive systems (MSc) and informatics (PhD) underpins creative and empirical interdisciplinary research in sonic (complex) systems at the interstices of music, technology and ecology. This includes improvisation, composition, field recording, instrument building and computational analysis of natural acoustic environments within the emerging field of ecoacoustics.

Current and recently funded projects include: development of novel acoustic methods for rapid biodiversity assessment and wilderness mapping in terrestrial and marine environments; participatory design of networked notation software to support ensemble music making; and exploring feedback as a design principle and musical aesthetic through developing new feedback musical instruments.

She has appeared on BBC TV Spring Watch and BBC radio 4 Costing the Earth as a soundscape ecologist; on BBC radio 3 Late Junction and Jazz on 3 as a free jazz cellist; on BBC radio 6 Lauren Laverne's show as a contemporary chamber composer; and on BBC radio 1 John Peel show as a pop bassist.


/// FluCoMa

The Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMA) instigates new musical ways of exploiting ever-growing banks of sound and gestures within the digital composition process, by bringing breakthroughs of signal decomposition DSP and machine learning to the toolset of techno-fluent computer composers, creative coders and digital artists.

These potent algorithms are currently partially available in closed bespoke software, or in laboratories, but not at a suitable level of modularity within the main coding environments used by the creative researchers, namely Max, Pd and SuperCollider, to allow groundbreaking sonic research into a rich unexploited area: the manipulation of large sound corpora. Indeed, with access to, genesis of, and storage of large sound banks now commonplace, novel ways of abstracting and manipulating them are needed to mine their inherent potential.

FluCoMa proposes to tackle this issue by empowering techno-fluent aesthetic researchers with a toolset for signal decomposition, and one for machine learning, as well as support material, in order to experiment with new sound and gesture design untapped in large corpora from within their high-level creative coding workflow. Three degrees of manipulations are set to be explored: (1) expressive browsing and descriptor-based taxonomy, (2) remixing, component replacement, and hybridisation by concatenation, and (3) pattern recognition at component level, with interpolating and variation-making potential. These novel manipulations will yield new sounds, new musical ideas, and new approaches to large corpora.

As with previous HISS projects, FluCoMa will deliver its findings open source, in the form of software (standalone and extensions) with extensive documentation and examples, as well as the underlying libraries in C++. Moreover, musical works commissioned to challenge these new methodologies will be released, through concerts and plenaries on surrounding subjects, and documented in academic papers. A users forum will also be at the centre of this emerging research community.

FluCoMa is based within the Department of Music and Music Technology, with its Centre for Research in New Music, on the Queensgate Campus of the University of Huddersfield. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 725899.